Chapter 25 Last Day At The Tower #2
Remembering we weren’t alone, I glanced at Alaric, who had just moved over to one of the long reading tables in the archive, and was poring over a family history written by one of Bones’s great-great-great aunts.
Alaric looked absorbed in what he was reading, but I knew better than to buy that.
He rarely missed so much as a word Bones and I exchanged.
“We did not,” I said quietly to Bones, my tone and eyes warning. That absolutely does not count. Especially since I didn’t even look like me.
Bones seemed to have come to the same conclusion on his own.
He nodded, looking down at the book he’d now pulled onto his lap.
“We’ll remedy that,” he said.
“Will we?” I asked, strangely amused. “Our options are pretty limited.”
“New Year’s,” he said, glancing up. He quirked an eyebrow. “Unless you have plans?”
“I do not,” I confirmed.
“Then it’s a date.”
I opened my mouth, then closed it, flushing. Feeling eyes on me, I turned to find Alaric watching both of us, smirking in amusement, and I promptly turned back to my book.
I couldn’t help worrying about Varya.
We would be heading back to Malcroix the following morning, and I didn’t like the idea of leaving her alone, and particularly not alone in the Tower.
Even knowing where her husband was, and the unlikelihood that anything would happen in the immediate future to change that, I wondered how long it would be before news leaked out about what she’d done, or how long it would take to reach Malefic in the Pyramid.
I knew Bones worried about the same thing.
He hadn’t said as much, not to me, but he didn’t need to.
Bones told me and Alaric the day after Yule that she was petitioning the Magical Authority for a severance from Malefic, which sounded like the equivalent of a Magical divorce.
She wanted the magical bond created between them during the marriage ceremony to be unraveled, and filed on the grounds of abuse of self, abuse of offspring, criminal behavior, incompatible morality, and infidelity, which Bones hadn’t commented on, other than to say it didn’t surprise him.
He said they had granted her petition, which had split the estate in two already.
There were elements of his father’s finances that could not go to her, since she was technically “no longer a Bones,” but because Malefic was in prison, he had no rights to those assets himself, and no ability to assign a new guardian of his funds.
Varya, however, did have that right, and she had bequeathed her prior legal oversight of the Bones estate to her son, Caelum, who now controlled those assets.
I didn’t fully understand all the intricacies, but the bottom line was clear.
All of Malefic’s money now fell under Caelum’s complete control.
That included all of his property, the ancestral accounts, and even all of the spells, rituals, and other unique magic licensed under the Bones name.
It also included the parts of Malcroix Bones Academy that the Bones family owned.
When I asked Bones what would happen when Malefic got released from prison, he’d shrugged, as if it were nothing.
“Legally, I would have to relinquish ownership to him willingly.” He glanced at me, an eyebrow quirked.
“Because I’m of age, and my father is now a convicted criminal, it’s not the same legally as it was with my mother, where she could only ever be a caretaker, due to her blood status.
For me, the transfer is considered permanent.
I would have to formally petition to change it, and we’d be called in front of the Parliamentary Council of Elders.
They would conduct various tests to ensure I hadn’t been coerced, and even then, if they didn’t agree with me that my father would be a responsible steward of the funds, they could still deny the petition. ”
For the first time, a faint smirk twitched Bones’s lips.
“Given he’s been found guilty of trying to overthrow their power, I don’t think he would have enough votes to save him. My mother’s fucked him, and she knows it.”
He’d stared through the tower window at the snow falling outside.
The look in his eyes, I realized in some shock, was love.
He was proud of his mother, and admired her for what she’d done, but I also knew his feelings were more complicated than that. I’d often caught him watching Varya after that night we exchanged gifts, the same, thoughtful look on his face.
He only did it when he thought his mother wasn’t looking.
On our last night at the Tower, Alaric, Bones and I settled in the library after dinner.
Varya had turned in early, and the three of us were all pretty exhausted on research, so I doubted we would accomplish much.
I know I felt discouraged at how little we’d managed to find out.
We’d collected thirty-two auric scans from the Bones family for Luc to compare to his other samples, so I supposed that was something.
The ritual Bones witnessed in Tunis felt a lot more important than that, not to mention learning more about the condition Bones was convinced he had.
We’d still learned nothing new about either.
Bones had gone through every ritual book he could find that dealt in blood magics, but he hadn’t managed to find anything that looked exactly like it.
He used his magic to describe the ritual to the archive, in the hopes the chimaera over the space might bring it to him, but it hadn’t.
He’d tried the same with caelum ignis, and got the same result.
He told me he’d barely made a dent in the books down there, given the time constraints, but I could tell he doubted the book would be kept there.
His father must keep those things somewhere else.
The Praecuri raided the site in Tunis the day after Bones woke up and told them everything. The catacombs had been sealed off, but G.O.R.E. managed to blast their way inside, only to find all of the passable areas of the catacombs completely abandoned.
Blackstone told us they likely wouldn’t be back, at least not anytime soon.
They had other places for such things.
I wandered over to Bones at the thought, holding a book of alchemical symbols in one hand.
He, unlike me and Alaric, sat at a desk near a window overlooking the grounds.
He had a stack of fresh parchment by his elbow, along with a pot of ink.
He bent over a single sheet from that stack, his gaze narrowed as he wrote a letter.
I’d seen him writing a fair-few letters since his mother’s Yule present, but he’d been doing it significantly more often over the past two nights.
When I came up on him that time, and laid a hand on his shoulder, he reached up to squeeze my fingers without lifting his quill tip from the parchment.
His other hand barely paused in its perfect strokes with the green-feathered pen.
I generally tried not to read over his shoulder, but I couldn’t help noticing this time that he wasn’t writing in English.
“Is that Russian?” I asked. I was impressed, in spite of myself. “You can write in Russian?” I paused. “Are you completely fluent then?”
“No,” he said absently. “My mother taught me some as a child, but I haven’t kept it up.”
The quill tip never stopped scratching, apart from when he paused to dip it in the pot of ink. I didn’t argue with his claim about his relative lack of proficiency in the Russian language, but I had my doubts that what he said was true.
“You can ask,” he said, a few strokes later. “What I’m writing. And who.”
I considered his offer, but in the end I only bent down and kissed him on the cheek.
Honestly, I didn’t want to distract him by making him explain it.
Anyway, the letter being in Russian told me a few things already, and they were the main things I might have wanted to ask.
I’d already overheard him trying to convince his mother to go to her family estates in St. Petersburg.
Bones thought it would be safer for her to have family around her, at least until the protests died down and some of the overt threat diminished.
Varya hadn’t seemed opposed to the idea exactly, although there was obviously still some bad blood with her parents.
“Your father agreed to the marriage,” Bones had cut in one morning, when I walked into the kitchen looking for coffee. He gave me a brief look, then turned back to his mother, voice blunt. “Not your sisters. Not your mother. You shouldn’t punish them.”
“She didn’t say anything,” Vayra retorted. “My mother just let them sort it out between them. Like I was a pig they were selling.”
“Maybe she couldn’t do anything?” Bones offered.
I had to assume Varya was still angry that her parents agreed to let her marry Malefic in the first place, given she’d been underage. Bones’s words obviously stung her, though, probably because she thought he was nodding towards her situation with Malefic.
“He wasn’t like that,” Varya said. “My father.”
“He’s dead,” Bones said bluntly. “It doesn’t matter what he was like.”
“I’m just saying, my mother could have pushed back. She could have. He wouldn’t have done anything to her. He wasn’t like Malefic.”
“But you wanted to marry him, didn’t you? At the time?”
I’d walked away at that point, not wanting to intrude more than I already had. I only stayed long enough to grab a mug from the cupboard before I walked out, even though I didn’t get the sense that either of them particularly minded me being there.
They didn’t join me and Alaric in the dining room for at least another twenty minutes. Alaric and I were talking about heading down to the archive again when they finally appeared, bringing a carafe of coffee and a plate of frosting-drizzled pastries.
Varya also told me, that same night before bed, that Caelum was worried about her. She informed me confidently that he absolutely shouldn’t be. She hinted strongly that she thought he should worry less, and that someone should tell him so, someone he might actually listen to.